MEDIDATA

How Medidata Accelerated the Time-to-Market of their BI Projects and Enabled their Clients to take Data-Driven Actions

Medidata, located in Porto, Portugal, is a Value-Added-Reseller (VAR) of Dundas Data
Visualization that specializes in ERP software Development for local Portuguese Governments.
Their primary objective is to modernize the technology and software programs used by
Portuguese governments in order to combat the rapid evolution of the market. Fundamentally,
they are committed to continuous development by providing products and services (such as
Support Systems, Back Office Applications, Document Repositories, etc.) that increasingly meet
the needs of Portuguese municipalities and their residents. As such, Medidata is dedicated
to providing their customers with ERP software products and services that help boost
self-government, improve document management, and enhance workflow.

Their Needs

Based on the demands of their clients to have software that allowed them to better
analyze and interact with the valuable data that was produced from the ERP software they
were using, Medidata felt it necessary to add a Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics
solution to their portfolio of software products. By providing a BI and analytics solution,
Medidata’s clients would be able to make better and more informed decisions in order to
improve their efficiencies and productivity.

In addition to their external needs, Medidata wanted a BI and analytics solution that would
detect issues regarding data quality within their own internally used software.

Partner Enablement

Prior to Medidata and Dundas
formalizing their partnership,
several conversations took place
between the two parties in order
for Medidata to thoroughly explain
their strategy of approaching clients.
Dundas got a better understanding
of how Medidata planned to sell
and market Dundas BI, and was
able to put together an enablement
program tailored specifically to Medidata’s needs. An onboarding process was created, which
allowed Medidata the opportunity to test Dundas BI with full support, for an extended time
period. Dundas also provided multimedia training content and webinars that simplified the
learning curve, which resulted in an increase in adoption across Medidata’s organization. In
addition to the provision of resources, Dundas has maintained consistent communication
with Medidata’s Account Managers, Support and Financial teams, which has helped forge
an even deeper relationship.

Their Solution

Medidata has had a working partnership with Dundas Data Visualization since early 2009,
when Dundas' development core was Business Intelligence components. Their decision to
migrate to Dundas BI was considered a ‘natural choice’ due to the current relationship in
place, and their existing satisfaction with Dundas' legacy products.

Why Medidata Chose Dundas BI

Superb Interactivity

Data Driven Alerts

Smart Design Tools

Extensibility

Performance Tuning

The extreme interactivity of Dundas BI visualizations allowed Medidata’s clients better engage with and understand their data. Countless data interactions such as filtering, sorting and expanding were beneficial and made easily available without their clients needing IT assistance for setup.

A key selling feature of Dundas BI, was the smart and intuitive design tools, which utilize drag-and-drop functionality to quickly design dashboards and reports. This simplified Medidata’s ability to run ad-hoc analysis and turn those into full dashboards.

“The endless data sources that Dundas supplies are a must!” – Dundas BI gives Medidata an array of data providers to enable them to connect to legacy or otherwise unsupported data sources.

Medidata enjoyed the ability to store the output of their data cubes within Dundas BI’s data warehouse for improved performance. The option to utilize an in-memory analytic model enabled even faster results for analytical queries.

Key Benefits

Since Dundas BI was implemented both within Medidata’s software portfolio, as well as
internally, they were able to benefit on both fronts. Internally, Medidata was able to
validate certain database attributes (such as dates), which were inaccurate in some
contexts but not in others. With Dundas BI, Medidata was able to discover their database
inconsistencies and implement validation on those attributes, specifically using the
Unknown Members functionality. This enabled them to customize the value displayed for
unknown values to a text value. Furthermore, they were also able to resolve several data
integrity issues that stemmed from foreign key constraints, since their development
framework was unable to apply foreign keys on their database prior to Dundas BI. This
has resulted in the resolution of 60% of the validity concerns Medidata faced.

Externally, Medidata’s clients benefited from an increased ability to take data-driven
actions, by being able
to better identify and understand their key performance
indicators (KPIs). Their clients were provided with dashboards that included KPIs such
as workflow performance, along with the ratio of workflow overdue tasks, grouped by
department. By making this information readily available, their client’s decision-makers
were able to adjust resources in real-time, adjust task execution time in multiple
scenarios, and ultimately improve their overdue tasks ratio. In addition, Medidata was
able to compile substantial financial information for their clients and visually present it
through dashboards and reports. They were able to provide their clients with overall budget
execution ratios on revenue and expense with period-over-period comparisons, as well as
expenses and revenues by financial classification with state indicators reflecting an increase
or decrease. Not only did this improve the availability of their client’s relevant financial
documentation, but with the help of data-driven notifications, their clients’
manager’s productivity increased noticeably and they experienced reduced uncertainty of why
financial availability dropped below a predefined threshold.

"While using Dundas BI, I found I was able to accelerate the time-to-market of my BI projects.
The usability, self-contained management and the easy way that, in a blink, I could see and
analyze data from various sources were a great and awesome surprise!"

Luis Silva

Senior BI Consultant

Medidata

What can Dundas do for you?

No one knows your business better than you do.Tell us what you’re trying to achieve and we’ll make sure you get there.